On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 08:36:49PM -0500, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> On 23/02/02 Jerry Van Brimmer did speaketh:
>
> > Well, I thought Mutt was a terminal based email client that could as
> > much or more than other email clients. So, I was hoping that I could
> > just download all messages into my mailbox and the headers would be
> > displayed in the index, sort of just like all others, i.e. Sylpheed.
> > I thought Mutt was a downloader/reader all in one? Am I wrong?
>
> Mutt follows the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well. My
> current setup is Mutt for reading/composing email, fetchmail to download,
> procmail to sort, exim to send. In this way, I can swap any component that I
> like and I don't lose my other specialists. Far superior to a monolithic
> application that tries to do it all, and does it badly.
This small-specialized-tools-are-better-than-monolithic-apps argument
keeps coming back like a mantra. It's so tired now as to seem almost
pre-recorded. (Where do you guys get that propaganda anyway?)
The keyword with mutt is integration: imap and pop are integrated with
mutt becauses it makes sense to _browse_ remote imap or pop folders (yes
mutt can do that with pop) and save stuff to remote imap folders (try that
with fetchmail). Real unix purists use uucp to download mail anyway,
not fetchmail.
--
PHEDRE: Non, je ne puis souffrir un bonheur qui m'outrage,
OEnone. Prends pitié de ma jalouse rage.
(Phèdre, J-B Racine, acte 4, scène 6)
